This invention relates generally to point-of-sale systems for use in pharmacies and, more specifically, to systems for automatically generating advisory and other information for distribution to pharmacy patients. Various systems have been used to distribute advisory and other information to pharmacy patients based principally on the identification of a prescription drug being purchased. Prescription drugs in the United States are uniquely identifiable by a National Drug Code (NDC), which is typically entered into a computer terminal by a pharmacist, and may be encoded on the product itself in bar-code form. Other prescription drug identification systems are employed in other countries, but the principle is the same: to provide a unique code for each prescription drug dispensed by the pharmacy. Based on the nature of the drug, a computer at the point of sale may be used to generate advisory messages to the patient, some of which may be required by governmental regulation, or to generate promotional materials concerning related or complementary products sold in the pharmacy.
Although such systems available prior to the present invention are satisfactory for some purposes, the advisory messages they provide are not always appropriately focused on the probable needs of the patients purchasing the drugs. Moreover, systems existing and proposed prior to the present invention typically require major software or hardware changes to existing pharmacy computer systems, the principal function of which is to print prescription labels, simple advisory messages and billing information. Ideally, additional functions should be provided without the need for major modification of existing pharmacy computer systems, other than to generate any additional data needed for the new functions. The present invention meets this objective, as further explained in the summary below.